Fudan students with their international peers tackled complex global challenges in African context using UN 2030 sustainability goals as their context.

The students from the Project Management and Product Development -course at a double master's degree ICT programme between Fudan University and University of Turku gave their final presentations Saturday 29th September. Their task was to go through a cycle of "From an Idea to a Product" in a project setting. The course sets main focus on combining inductive and human-centred design thinking methods, processes and activities with natural sciences based and deductive engineering know-how. "The fundamental idea being that in the complex world of high technology an engineer needs to first thoroughly understand the needs of different stakeholders such as customer and user and only after that design a holistic engineering solution that serves that need", said Mr. Ville Taajamaa, the course mentor.

Final products from the course were embedded smart system that answered a tangible real-life need in Africa and were based on one or several of the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The project outcomes and products were assessed in terms of their 1) feasibility i.e. is it possible to actually produce such a product and service, 2) desirability i.e. is there a user group that wants to use the product and 3) viability i.e. is the customer ready to pay for the product and is it able to make profit.

During the course, a long-lasting industrial partner, a Finnish based company KONE and the Head of Design for Asia, Mr. Jussi Hiltunen provided his valuable insight and a practical workshop to the students at KONE Kunshan production and research & development site. Students were able to visit the actual manufacturing location of KONE products and in the afternoon go through a needfinding and design – development cycle led by Mr. J. Hiltunen. The goal was to understand the importance of finding the real need of the customer and user. The workshop was of high quality and proved to be very valuable to students learning while serving the overall goals of the course.